30. Liam

30

LIAM

I sit straight up in the bed later that night, soaked with sweat, breathing like I just ran a marathon, my mind reeling, nearly knocking Marley to the ground in the process.

“Everything okay?” Marley asks, yawning as she tries to figure out what the fuck just happened.

My chest squeezes like there’s an invisible fist around it, and the dark room spins around me. I can hear Marley asking if I’m okay, but her voice sounds a million miles away. All I can feel are the walls closing in, the last bits of oxygen leaving the room.

I try to inhale but it feels like broken glass to my lungs. “I need…” I gasp, throwing back the covers.

“What? You need what?” Marley asks, her voice turning from confused to frightened as I push my way out of bed. “Are you okay?”

“I just need…” I can’t finish my sentence. There isn’t enough air in this room. Not caring that I’m completely naked, I stumble into the living room, hoping my lungs will unclench. They don’t.

“Liam,” Marley follows me, the blanket from the bed wrapped around her like a toga. “Do you need me to call 911?” She touches my forehead, but her fingers feel like molten steel.

The hurt in her eyes when I flinch away from her touch doesn’t even register at the moment. “I’m fine. I just need…” I need to run. I need to run until I can’t move anymore. I dash back into the bedroom, flip the overhead light on and pull on my running gear.

“Liam,” Marley tries again from the doorway, watching me with confusion in her pretty eyes. The hit my gut takes only makes this—whatever it is—more painful. “Are you going somewhere?”

I sit down on the bed and pull on my running shoes, tying them as if my life depended on it.

“Are you going for a run?”

When I don’t answer, she sits beside me on the bed. “Liam, what is wrong?”

I don’t look at her—I just double-knot my laces. “I just need air. I just need to run.”

“At three in the morning?”

“Yes, at three in the morning,” I bite at her, immediately regretting it when her eyes water slightly. Jesus Christ, she’s so beautiful it almost destroys me. I try to temper my tone. “I’ll be back. I promise.”

“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

I push off the bed and head toward the door without answering. I don’t even know what’s going on.

“Liam,” she says with a little more force, making me turn around.

“I will be back, Marley. I promise.”

Her bottom lip wobbles a little, but she doesn’t let any tears fall and I don’t stay to find out what she says next because I’m out the door.

I groan loudly into the cold night air, letting it fill my lungs with a different kind of sharpness. And then I run. Blindly, forward, my feet pounding against concrete, echoing off the buildings of the silent town, forward, forward, harder, faster, up the trail towards Paintbrush Peak.

My lungs feel like lead, and my feet weigh a thousand pounds each, but I keep going, the air getting thinner and thinner until I collapse forward on the trail, skinning the palms of my hands, tears streaming down my cheeks as I let my emotions take over me.

The dream. My God, the dream. I was right back in my dad’s office, watching the man I admired most in the world fall apart at the seams—like a memory on steroids. I could feel his screams echo in my chest, feel the vibrations of everything in his office being thrown against the wall. The pain is so visceral it physically incapacitates me.

“How am I going to live without her? How can I exist in this world without her? How is it fair that I’m alive and she isn’t? Catherine! Catherine!”

Only my dream turned Catherine into Marley and I had switched places with my father. Marley had died and I was broken.

My God, even the thought of her getting injured—a paper cut, a fucking mosquito bite—makes me crazy and that can’t be normal, right?

I push myself over to lie on the cold dirt path, staring up at the sky. It’s filled with millions of stars in the way you can only see in the wilderness. I run my fingertips through the dirt and try to remind myself that my dream wasn’t real. That Marley is fine.

That it’s okay that I love her.

I truly love her. Like I never thought possible.

She’s at home waiting for me and I’m just an idiot making dirt angels in the middle of the night halfway up a mountain.

So, I breathe. And I stare at the stars. And I touch the earth. Until my anxiety lets go. Until my lungs finally unclench, and I can draw in the fresh, clean, surprisingly icy air.

When I sit up again, I can think straight. And just like I should, I feel like a complete idiot.

Pushing myself up off the path, I brush the dirt off as best as I can and jog my way back down the mountain, hoping my weird departure didn’t scare Marley away. It occurs to me that I really need to think about therapy, and I make a mental note to ask Max about it tomorrow. Or Gus. Gus might keep it to herself a little better.

My stomach pulls when I see Marley watching for me at the window and I climb the steps up to the apartment with a heavy weight in my stomach. She deserves an explanation. But I’m not sure I can give it to her. Not yet.

“My God,” Marley rushes toward me, now dressed in one of my T-shirts and a pair of yoga pants. It strikes me again just how much I love this woman and how a simple thing like wearing my T-shirt can make me feel whole again. “Are you okay? You’re covered in dirt.”

“I’m okay,” I promise her, kissing her lips. “I shouldn’t have left you like that. I had a nightmare that got under my skin, and I didn’t know how to react. I’m sorry.”

She puts her arms around my middle without a care for the dirt or the sweat or the pile of stupidity that is me. She squeezes me so tight I almost feel put back together. “I’m just glad you came back.”